JD Vance States the Obvious About Ordo Amoris

We are living, it scarcely needs saying, in unpredictable times. But no one could have imagined that within days of Donald J. Trump’s triumphant return to the White House, a close-quarters street fight in biblical exegesis and theological ethics would break out in front of tens of millions of people, between the vice president of the United States and a former British Conservative member of Parliament and sometime tutor to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

Yet here we are. The provocation began when JD Vance offered to a Fox News interviewer the seemingly inoffensive observation that charity begins at home. It was, he noted in passing, “an old-school idea” and “a Christian concept.” He was correct on both counts. Something like this idea goes back as far as the Lyceum and the Stoa. Aristotle begins his Politics with a careful account of society’s organic growth: from the bonding of men and women, to families, then villages, and finally to the highest form of community, the bounded domain of the city-state. To be a “political animal” meant being fitted for a particular polis, and certainly not to be a kosmopolitēs. Meanwhile, Stoics such as Hierocles and Cicero tempered their moral cosmopolitanism with the injunction to practice (respectively) oikeiosis and conciliatio, the practice of seeking to draw all of humanity into our immediate sphere of concern to the extent possible.

The Christian pedigree of the concept is even harder to deny. Perhaps the idea is wired only implicitly into the moral logic of the New Testament. But that is equally true of doctrines and dogmas that carry much greater weight. When explicated in Augustine’s On Christian Teaching or in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, the ordo amoris emerges as a concept that is both cogent on its own terms—reciprocal obligations incurred through birth and upbringing are, after all, self-evidently stronger than those we freely undertake through choice or circumstance—and entirely consistent with the moral grammar of the scriptural witness. The idea that we must structure and not dissipate our finite and fragile stock of affections and loyalties does nothing to undermine Christianity’s revolutionary insistence on the inestimable worth of every human being, a claim that rooted human worth not in fallible human affections or human agency but in the perfect love of God for each of his creatures.

All of this did not prevent former MP Rory Stewart from taking to X to criticize Vance’s “bizarre take on John 15:12-13—less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love.” Vance responded by introducing millions of social media users to a Latin tag, which he promptly rendered in concrete terms:

Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?

Stewart was worried that Vance’s appeal to the idea of preferentially directed affections contradicted John 15:12–13: Christ’s praise for the person who lays down his life for his friends entails that benevolence was always meant to be borderless or, at least, dispersed equally across humanity as a whole. It was a puzzling stratagem to pursue. Those verses do contain, of course, an oblique self-reference: Christ’s impending sacrifice, John implies, would be for the whole of humanity. But that act was uniquely and dispositively an achievement that only Christ could undertake. The broader moral precept is that radical acts of self-sacrificial love for one’s friends—that is, for those particular people with whom providence has placed us in life—exemplify the greatest love of all.

Stewart seemed to recognize the inadequacy of this opening gambit, for he then appealed to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) as a proof-text for generous disbursements of foreign aid. This approach had more force. The message of the parable, though, is not that a person should help all victims wherever they may be, but that whatever differences may divide us from the suffering, we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern. Suggestively, the Greek word for neighbor in the New Testament is πλησίον (plēsion), which is derived directly from πλησίος (plēsios), meaning “near” or “close by.” It is proximity that makes neighbors our objects of care and attention. Moreover, we feel shock at the indifference of the lawyer and the Levite primarily because of the moral intuition that each fails to honor his social and religious ties to the victim, an intuition that the parable does nothing to repudiate.

Stewart’s intervention was instructive on one front: It showed us that for late-stage liberalism’s cosmopolitan egalitarians, hierarchies of the heart are as suspicious and objectionable as any other. It was also a reminder that in a secular age that has dissolved the moral ideal of metaphysical equality in its skeptical acids, equal human worth can be secured only in immanent terms, by equalizing material resources for all.

The philosopher and atheist Bernard Williams once remarked that the man who, when faced with the choice of saving his drowning wife or a drowning stranger, hesitates to consider which course of action would contribute more to the overall good of humanity has had one thought too many. Americans should be thankful that in their new vice president they have a leader who is not going to hesitate to put his own people first.